Police in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru have arrested a crèche worker for allegedly abusing toddlers at a daycare centre set up for children of the employees of a major tech company.
The arrest was made days after videos, allegedly showing female crèche workers assaulting and intimidating crying children by shutting them in toilets and washing machines and spraying them with a bidet, surfaced online.
Police have registered a case against five employees of the crèche at Capgemini and say more arrests are likely.
Many corporates in India have begun setting up daycare centres on campus to attract and retain talent, but the regulatory frameworks governing them remain loose.
Capgemini has temporarily shut the daycare centre, external.
"Capgemini's foremost priority is the health, safety and wellbeing of its employees and their families. We are cooperating fully with the relevant authorities and assisting them in their efforts to establish the facts," the company said in a statement.
"As a precautionary measure, we are temporarily closing the Bengaluru on-campus daycare facility," it added.
Unlike schools that are governed by well-defined regulations, children's daycare facilities in India operate under a clutch of state-level rules, municipal regulations and local licencing requirements.
Their standards differ from state to state and implementation of rules remains lax.
The recent incident came to light after an anonymous caller reportedly informed the city's child protection unit that toddlers at a crèche inside Capgemini's Brookfield campus were allegedly being abused and shared videos of the abuse with officials.
Thilakesh Kumar, a child protection official, followed up on the complaint and found that the alleged abuse had taken place inside a toilet, where there was no coverage of CCTV cameras.
Based on a complaint from Kumar, police registered a case against five employees at the facility under sections of India's penal code and the juvenile justice law.
Bengaluru police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh told BBC Hindi that the arrested accused was Vijayalakshmi and that she had been sent to judicial custody.
Another police official who did not wish to be named told the BBC that two other caregivers had been questioned over the incident on Thursday.
Karnataka's Home Minister Priyank Kharge said the government was looking into the matter and that action would be taken against those found guilty of flouting rules.
Meanwhile, the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights is also investigating the case and is scheduled to visit the daycare facility on Friday.
